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I suppose not many people nowadays remember Oliver Peyton’s Mash bars, which flourished in the mid-Nineties in Manchester and London: the former handy for Piccadilly station and the fleshpots of Canal Street, the latter vectored like a Scud missile on the heartland of the W1 rag trade. But I was fond of them both.

They were a bit Clockwork Orange, a bit industrial, a bit designer (at the Manchester one, it was mystifyingly easy for a gentleman of above-average height to pee in the sink by mistake, or so I’ve heard at least), a tiny bit louche. Both were as redolent of that low, dishonest decade as hedgehog hairstyles, voluminous cargo pants and the Private Finance Initiative

I mention Peyton's Mash imperium not because this week’s restaurant has been named in any sort of tribute to it – though it’s strikingly well-designed for a country pub-restaurant, or rather restaurant-in-a-former-country-pub. In fact, depressingly somehow, The Mash Inn is so called because it’s owned by one Nick Mash.

Chef Jon Parry is steering a narrow course between the Scylla of rustic primitivism and the Charybdis of archly arty metro-chic

To be honest, I’m not quite sure why I mention it at all, though you can see why it might have come to mind. I think it has something to do with the cleverness of the name: the way its simplicity and wholesomeness offset the airs and graces of the project. In the depths of the Chilterns, Mash’s chef Jon Parry is playing a different version of the same game: trying to steer a narrow course between the Scylla of rustic primitivism and the Charybdis of archly arty metro-chic.

We arrived early for dinner. They’ve retained the front of the building as a curatorially correct country-pub taproom, with a small bar, wonky brickwork, en suite inglenook, inexplicably tiny windows, hefty wooden furniture, flagstones and all the trimmings. You can imagine the Witchfinder General coming in 350 years ago, slamming the door, shaking the dust off his cloak and ­ordering a small beer and a packet of pork scratchings before narrowing his eyes to inquire whether any local wenches had been engaging in ungodly behaviour lately. In practice, it seems to serve the present-day Mash operation as a sort of waiting room.

Licensed to grill: Mash's head chef Jon Parry (l) and chef de partie Dom Ahearne at workCredit:
Andrew Crowley for The Telegraph

Before they take you through to the dining area, you are escorted to the open kitchen for a meet and greet with the chef’s team, who move around calmly and efficiently, tending the massive wood-fired grill that dominates the space, and more or less managing to convince that the whole pantomime is not a colossal pain in the neck for them. You’re also introduced to elements of the “sharing menu” (on our visit, a stack of impeccable-looking côtes de boeuf), and various pickly-foragey foodstuffs, sparkling invitingly in their bowers of Tupperware.

I’m not sure what the logic of this is – they set great store by transparency and “honest” ingredients, and if you’ve ever been mis-sold PPI by a sausage or had your heart broken by a heritage carrot I’m sure you will welcome this. But I’m not sure our pre-dinner tour particularly informed our menu choices, such as they were.

We were on the “daily menu” at £55 a head – six courses, choice of mains, cheese or pudding – so between two of us we got to taste it all. (There’s also a full-blown tasting menu at a bracing £150 with wine.) Over what was effectively an amuse-bouche of smoked salmon, served with beef crackers and squeezelings of taramasalata, topped with “posh caviar”, some sort of Douglas fir extract and, excitingly, a pickled mahonia bud, we looked about us. The dining space is higher and wider than either the pub bit or the kitchen: stone-floored, peopled with rustic contemporary furniture, subtly Farrow & Balled, decorated with some good prints including several Michael Craig-Martins and a windswept and faintly menacing bee.

The whole back is glazed and French-windowed – it was too dark to see the view across to Bledlow Ridge, but they’ve got a terrace outside with one of those big iron firebowls, which flickered winsomely in the milled edges of the windowpanes. The loos are elegant – in a distinctly west London way – and seemed more or less foolproof.

Our food was ambitious, imaginatively conceived and confidently realised. It might have been more varied texturally – they love a velouté – and at times the more unusual ingredients, from “house pickles” to pickled fennel seeds to “lamb bacon” to gorse, might have been more liberally applied. I wouldn’t have minded more than one mahonia bud, either, come to that. But the balancing of flavours, whether in individual dishes – we especially liked a smooth romanesco soup spiked with little astringent cubes of russet apple and chewy nuggets of black garlic – or across the whole six courses, was superb. And, thanks I guess to that grill, they’re excellent at cooking meat (viz my fallow deer leg) and fish (my friend’s hunk of cod).

They obviously got a Google Alert that venison’s not fashionable any more, scoffed my friend

When we asked to see the menu again so I could take some photographs of it, not that they are any use as I have an iPhone 5C, they had substituted lamb for venison. “They obviously got a Google Alert that venison’s not fashionable any more,” scoffed my friend. But it’s really not that kind of place. It’s in sincere pursuit of a particular strain of excellence, founded on craft, good taste and a localism that’s passionate but pragmatic (our cod came with “salty fingers”, a sort of fat samphirey coastal succulent, sourced like the cod from the excellent Flying Fish in Cornwall).

It’s very slightly the sort of place where you can imagine David and Samantha Cameron stopping off on the way from Holland Park to the Cotswolds – but then I suspect he was a bit of a Mash W1 man, too, back in the day.